Two Suffolk Friends | Page 8

over her. The schoolmistress then, a Miss Hindmarsh,

took a great liking for the old man; and a friend of hers, a widow lady
in London, though she had never seen him, made him a regular weekly
allowance to the end of his life--two shillings, half-a-crown, and
sometimes more. This gave Will many little comforts. Once when my
sister took him his allowance, he told her how, when he was a young
man, a Gipsy woman told him he should be better off at the end of his
life than at the beginning; and "she spook truth," he said, "but how she
knew it I coon't saa." Will suffered at times from rheumatism, and had
great faith in some particular green herb pills, which were to be bought
only at one particular shop in Ipswich. My sister was once deputed to
buy him a box of these pills, and he told her afterwards, "Them there
pills did me a lot of good, and that show what fooks saa about
rheumatics bein' in the boones ain't trew, for how could them there pills
'a got into the boones?" He was very fond of my father, whom he liked
to joke with him. "Mr Groome," he once said, "dew mob me so."
Will, like many other old people in the parish, believed in
witchcraft,--was himself, indeed, a "wise man" of a kind. My father
once told him about a woman who had fits. "Ah!" old Will said, "she've
fallen into bad hands." "What do you mean?" asked my father; and then
Will said that years before in Monk Soham there was a woman took
bad just like this one, and "there wern't but me and John Abbott in the
place could git her right." "What did you do?" said my father. "We two,
John and I, sat by a clear fire; and we had to bile some of the clippins
of the woman's nails and some of her hair; and when ta biled"--he
paused. "What happened?" asked my father; "did you hear anything?"
"Hear anything! I should think we did. When ta biled, we h'ard a loud
shrike a-roarin' up the chimley; and yeou may depind upon it, she
warn't niver bad no more."
Once my father showed Will a silhouette of his father, old Mr Groome
of Earl Soham, a portly gentleman, dressed in the old-fashioned style.
"Ruffles, who is this?" he asked, knowing that Will had known his
father well, and thinking he would recognise it. After looking at it
carefully for some time, Will said, "That's yar son, the sailor." My
eldest brother at that time might be something over twenty, and bore
not the faintest resemblance to our grandfather; still, Will knew that he

had been much abroad, and fancied a tropical sun might have
blackened him.
By his own accounts, Will's feats of strength as a younger man, in the
way of reaping, mowing, &c., were remarkable; and there was one
great story, with much in it about "goolden guineas," of the wonderful
sale of corn that he effected for one of his masters. At the rectory
gatherings on Christmas night Will was one of the principal singers, his
chef-d'oeuvre "Oh! silver [query Sylvia] is a charming thing," and "The
Helmingham Wolunteers." That famous corps was raised by Lord
Dysart to repel "Bony's" threatened invasion; its drummer was John
Noble, afterwards the wheelwright in Monk Soham. Once after drill
Lord Dysart said to him: "You played that very well, John Noble;" and
"I know't, my lord, I know't," was John's answer--an answer that has
passed into a Suffolk proverb, "I know't, my lord, I know't, as said John
Noble."
Mrs Curtis was quite a character--a little woman, with sharp brown
eyes that took in everything. Her tongue was smooth, her words were
soft, and yet she could say bitter things. She had had a large family,
who married and settled in different parts. One son had gone to New
Zealand--"a country, Dr Fletcher tell me, dear Miss, as is outside the
frame of the earth, and where the sun go round t'other way." It was for
one of her sons, when he was ill, that my mother sent a dose of
castor-oil; and next day the boy sent to ask for "some more of Madam
Groome's nice gravy." Another boy, Ephraim, once behaved so badly in
church that my father had to stop in his sermon and tell Mrs Curtis to
take her son out. This she did; and from the pulpit my father saw her
driving the unfortunate Ephraim before her with her umbrella, banging
him with it first on one side and then on the other. Mrs Curtis it was
who prescribed the honey- plaster for a sore throat. "Put on a
honey-plaster, neighbour dear; that will